Amarisa's Cooking Pot

Los Angeles native Désirée Zamorano is the author of the groundbreaking historical novel, Dispossessed, as well as the highly acclaimed literary novel, The Amado Women. An award-winning and Pushcart prize–nominated short story writer, Zamorano's work explores where cultures collide and connect. A selection of her work can be found in Alta, The Kenyon Review Online, and Akashic's South Central Noir. She teaches linguistic and cultural diversity at California State University Long Beach and is a senior fiction editor at Silk Road Review.

"Zamorano's collection of stories is a medley of surprises, heartbreak, and triumph. In these tales, Zamorano offers a feast both magical and stark, interweaving miracles and realities of working-class daily life amid the bonds of family—mothers and sons, daughters and grandmothers, lovers snatching tenderness in ambiguous spaces—and with deft language and precise, evocative style, lays open the complicated webbing connecting this community." —Marcela Fuentes, author of Malas, Reforma National Book Award winner  "How deft, vibrant, and heartfelt these stories are. I love the way they slip, subtly, from quiet domesticity to magic, then back again; I love even more how often the conduit for those shifts is a perfectly imagined mundane detail, such as an inherited cooking pot or a mother's shed strands of hair. And when these stories offer glimpses of wonder, they do so in order to give Zamorano's characters justice that the world denies them." —Holly Goddard Jones, author of Antipodes: Stories and Girl Trouble: Stories "Désirée Zamorano's delightful debut story collection is an enchanting world of varied, fascinating, mostly Latine characters whose interiority she explores masterfully. With eloquence and care, Zamorano renders a refreshing range of Latinas of all classes—daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and wives—whose disparate experiences include a college professor with a PhD, a dental hygienist, a business woman at the top of her game, a student, and even God Herself. This gorgeous, entertaining collection of characters and stories is a triumph." —Toni Ann Johnson, author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning linked story collection, Light Skin Gone to Waste, and But Where's Home   "Zamorano offers a significant contribution to Latinx short story collections." —Norma Cantú, Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Trinity University, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera

• Contents Family Quartet Amarisa's Cooking Pot The Upholsterer Wednesday Caperucita Roja Mothers And Sons Unconditional Love Cookies Austin Norma The Gritty Mercy 1969 Anomaly President-elect Tai Chi Lessons If Found Please Return The Fantastical The Argumentative Wishing Well Adela's Pages Magda's Hen Cameo Alma Paramo Flight Había Una Vez Acknowledgments About the Author